People of the Book: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of People of the Book: A Novel
Book Review: Fascinating Glimpses
Summary: 4 Stars
I very much enjoyed this book as it deals with an area of interest to me (illuminated manuscripts), combined with the history of areas and peoples I have relatively little knowledge and understanding about.
The book alternates the events in the narrator's life in the present day with chapters dealing with the history of the Jewish Haggadah manuscript she is restoring. Each of the historical chapters retreats further back in time until we learn how the book came to be created in the first place.
It is interesting and absorbing stuff. The only thing I didn't enjoy so much was that I would be just getting into the life of the character in one of the historical chapters when we would move abruptly back to the present day. Any one of those episodes would have made book in itself.
Overall, I would certainly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history. It is well written and the plot unfolds at a good pace.
Book Review: A breath-taking journey into the past
Summary: 5 Stars
Geraldine Brooks has proved that she is adept in historical research and recreating the past in "March", her novel telling the story of Mr March from L M Alcott's classic "Little Women". Now she has repeated and excelled her achievement in this novel based on fact: the story of the Haggadah, a Jewish Book of Hours, a precious and mysterious volume with exquisite illuminations.
In 1996 Hanna Heath, an expert on rare books, is given the task of analysing and conserving the Haggadah in Sarajevo. With an eye for minute detail and dogged determination for answers she embarks on a quest to trace the Haggadah's history from clues she finds on the pages and in the binding. When the book gives up its first secret - the tiniest scrap of a butterfly's wing - we are plunged from one war into another, from the present into the past, as we are taken to 1940s Bosnia.
The sections set in the past (Bosnia, epicurean 19th century Vienna, Venice during the Inquisition, Barcelona in time of Torquemada and Seville in the 1400s) are not just chapters of a book; they are stories complete in themselves. The characters are beautifully drawn, the past as vivid as the present, the plot entrancing and the detail precise. You are drawn in, desperate to discover how each chapter develops and what next happens to the book - and those who surround and protect it. At the end of the novel the story comes full circle, to Jerusalem in 2002 and back to Lola, who we were first introduced to at the very start of the novel. Hers is the only story which `ends'; the others leave the reader to imagine their own conclusion.
Hanna, the present-day heroine, is initially rather cold and emotionally detached, which stops the reader warming to her. However, as subtly as the Haggadah gives up its secrets, so Brooks gradually uncovers Hanna's past until at the end of the book you understand and empathise with her more. The Haggadah too becomes a character in itself, living and vital.
This is not just an absorbing, beautifully written novel: it is a comprehensive and fascinating lesson in religious history. The Haggadah is a genuine artefact: Brooks has examined it thoroughly and developed her own version of its story, its journey across the world, and those it touched along the way. Her painstaking research and gifted imagination has paid off - she has created a book as fascinating, vivid and compelling as its subject illuminated in ultramarine, saffron and scarlet.
Book Review: Ho Hum
Summary: 2 Stars
This fictional 'history' of a real book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, belongs to that mini-genre of books which feature different threads of narrative around an object - thus trying to give the object its own story through the people who encounter it. Most of these books I do not like and this one is not an exception. For me the best of this genre is Allen Kurzweil's 'A Case of Curiosities' and its sequel, 'A Grand Complication'.
This novel feels like lazy writing, a few short stories combined to try and create a unifying whole - the general theme seems to be anti-smitism through the ages. Each narrative is joined by the efforts of a book conservationist to find out the history for herself and an article she is writing on the book. Even the ending feels forced - where the novel seems to change tack and try to become a bit of a thriller.
I read the book but at the end I just thought 'what was the point' and felt a non-fictional treating of the history of the Haggadah would have been more interesting and satisfying.
Have saying that it is an easy read and wouldn't be out of place in people's lists of beach reading books.
Book Review: A real page-turner
Summary: 5 Stars
The Sarajevo Haggadah is a beautifully-illustrated Jewish book, made in Spain possibly 600 years ago, which resides in the National Museum of Bosnia in Sarajevo. Little is known of its origin and history, but it was saved from Nazi destruction in 1941 and from Serbian destruction in the Balkan war of the 1990s, on both occasions by Moslems. The particular significance of the book being illustrated is that images are prohibited according to both Jewish and Moslem teaching.
Geraldine Brooks has fashioned an excitingly imaginative history of this book, making use of what little is known of its whereabouts over the centuries, and involving a huge amount of research. For example, we are told in the afterword that as long ago as 2001 she was allowed to watch a conservationist working on the real haggadah, and she also had long conversations with the family of the Islamic scholar who saved it from the Nazis. The novel's first-person protagonist is Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert with a tempestuous relationship with her surgeon mother. Hanna is offered the job of analysing and conserving the haggadah, with its (fictitious) remnants of past handlings such as an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. This involves her in visits to Vienna, Boston, and London, while each present-day chapter is followed by fictional reconstructions of past events in Sarajevo, Vienna, Venice, Barcelona, and Seville, as far back as 1480, each of these chapters giving dramatic explanations of how these objects might have come to be embedded in the binding.
I found the novel a real page-turner, which could well become a favourite of reading groups. Throughout we are plunged into the conflicts between the three great Abrahamic faiths, though the author is clearly trying to show that co-operation between them has been far more common than is often assumed. For both the present-day and historical sections the narrative is full of twists and turns, with characters changing names, religion, and even gender. For me the most interesting chapter is that set in Venice in 1609, involving a friendship and rivalry between a priest of the Inquisition called Vistorini (a real character whose handwritten inscription saved the book from the fires) and a gambling-addicted rabbi. The novel's last ten pages, set in Sarajevo in 2002, are almost Hitchcockian in their suspense, and it occurred to me that the whole novel is eminently filmable, with its numerous locations and historical episodes.
The real history of the haggadah is almost certainly much less dramatic than is portrayed here. That does not matter; People of the Book combines historical illumination with a series of enjoyable detective stories and, in the present-day sections, some Aussie-style humour, though Hanna can be a slightly irritating character. As a detective story about a priceless art object, it leaves the abysmal and ridiculous Da Vinci Code far, far behind.
Book Review: A mixed bag, could have been really good
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a review of a proof copy of "People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks.
I feel this is an "intelligent, beach-holiday" book.
The Good
The story-telling develops tension. The cutting backwards and forwards in time so that current mysteries are later explained by events that happened in the past creates a "mystery suspense" atmosphere.
I cared about most of the characters and felt they were well described. You could even understand and sympathise (a little) with the villainous characters such as Vistorini.
The description of the beginning of the war and the Bosnians reactions to it was compelling and involving. The writing about the fear of the Jews in the synagogue in Sarajevo, the partisan children and Mittl the book-binder were all gripping.
The Not-so-good
I read that the author is / was (?) Australian but I was irritated no end by the use of "strine" phrases in the "modern" sections. Those sections came across as sloppy and grating rather than stylish.
For example:
"I doubt I would have gotten much sleep"
"I threw on my sweats"
Pg 12 "The driver gunned the engine"
pg 15 "The snow light flared on brightness" (???)
pg 18 " .. if you know when that particular breed was all the go .. "
Pg 24: stoushing
pg 29: Laminex (formica?)
pg 136 " ... middle of some blue .."
I preferred the style of writing in the "historical" sections that evoked a convincing atmosphere and mood. Except ... I was irritated by the frequent use of unexplained Latin and Italian words such as "campiello" on pg 149 which made me feel the author was trying to show off her depth and range of knowledge.
Also, there were too many key events in the story that struck me as implausible. For example:
* Being able to detect from one line in a spectrogram the presence, not just of wine, but a particular type of wine
* That Hannah spent six months in Japan learning how to make wheat paste. At that rate she would never have been able to develop the forensic skills she had and the story needed
* Her mother being able to deduce the relationship between Hannah and Ozren as her mother was not interested in Hannah or what she did
* The final "Mission Impossible" retrieval of the Haggadah
The to-be-corrected-before-publication
near beginning : hte > the
Pg 167 emending > amending (?)
pg 134 "Harbuor"
pg 204 boxite > bauxite (?)
pg 207 end: missing "
pg 242 :"
pg 249 "Indeed"